The present invention relates, in general, to the field of computer architectures incorporating multiple processing elements. More particularly, the present invention relates to a multiprocessor computer architecture incorporating a number of memory algorithm processors in the memory subsystem to significantly enhance overall system processing speed.
All general purpose computers are based on circuits that have some form of processing element. These may take the form of microprocessor chips or could be a collection of smaller chips coupled together to form a processor. In any case, these processors are designed to execute programs that are defined by a set of program steps. The fact that these steps, or commands, can be rearranged to create different end results using the same computer hardware is key to the computer's flexibility. Unfortunately, this flexibility dictates that the hardware then be designed to handle a variety of possible functions, which results in generally slower operation than would be the case were it able to be designed to handle only one particular function. On the other hand, a single function computer is inherently not a particularly versatile computer.
Recently, several groups have begun to experiment with creating a processor out of circuits that are electrically reconfigurable. This would allow the processor to execute a small set of functions more quickly and then be electrically reconfigured to execute a different small set. While this accelerates some program execution speeds, there are many functions that cannot be implemented well in this type of system due to the circuit densities that can be achieved in reconfigurable integrated circuits, such as 64-bit floating point math. In addition, all of these systems are presently intended to contain processors that operate alone. In high performance systems, this is not the case. Hundreds or even tens of thousands of processors are often used to solve a single problem in a timely manner. This introduces numerous issues that such reconfigurable computers cannot handle, such as sharing of a single copy of the operating system. In addition, a large system constructed from this type of custom hardware would naturally be very expensive to produce.